Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Open Beta Is Live

Phase 4 of the beta for the Final Fantasy MMO is now ready, after 24 hours of being available to beta testers who played Phase 3 or earlier. It's an open beta, so you can join up as long as you have a Square Enix account . If you can encourage friends and family to sign up for one, they can get in on the action as well.

Of course, it helps if you've already signed up and got the client, but you haven't, never fear. The beta tester registration site is taking registrations now and you can play until 2am Monday PST - that’s 7pm tomorrow night AEST.

Be warned, the client download is 7GB (for my PC version, at least), so you may not be able to download it before the beta closes if you're on a slow connection. However, if you do manage to get it up and running, any characters you create won’t be deleted, so you’ll have it prepared for the final release on August 27.

Also, if people are having problems 'accepting' the license agreement, go to My Games > Final Fantasy 14 > BOOT config file. Open in notepad. Change EulaAgreement and B4 EulaAgreement to 1.
Should be able to proceed.

You made the right choice of choosing a JP server. Most people playing on the NA/EU servers are currently locked out of their character due to error 3102... myself included (some have been locked out for 30+ hours).

I'm not really that annoyed. Already got one class to level 20 and since you don't get any experience points at level cap, yeah. I also have Tales of Xillia to keep me preoccupied.

Sure did. :D The ping is lower, too, which was one of the deciding factors. I'd estimate the server is approx 2/3 or 3/4 english-speaking, which is great, too.

I hit level 20 on Marauder last night, so I'm levelling some other classes with the time i have left. Probably going to level CNJ and PUG to 8 for Protect and Second Wind. Tempted to continue with story/class guild quests, but I don't want to waste all of that EXP.

I'm really enjoying it and I hope the Aus community becomes decent enough to stick with it.

Yup tonberry is where it's at for anyone in SEA region. And currently the best guild to join is Mirai, the website is mirai.guildwork.com and there's already 300+ members lol. Surprised it grew so quickly!!

Unfortunately, this game is not ready for release. There are serious infrastructure issues that need to be addressed. The last 48 hours of the open beta have been a total train wreck. Many thousands of players unable to log on because of the '90000' and '3102' errors. The '3102' is especially bad, because once you get it, it prevents you from using ANY of the characters on that account. Including newly made ones. Additionally, the congestion is preventing those lucky enough to avoid those errors from logging on. I have a few friends who play, and they were all prevented from participating because of the '3102' error. I was the "lucky" one, because I didn't get the error, however I am not able to play because of the congestion.

These kinds of things are certainly to be expected in a beta, but not on this scale, and not for this long. Also, they knew well in advance the number of people enrolled in open beta, and had ample time to prepare for the server loads. The game now holds the record for concurrent users in an open beta, over 160,000. They knew that was going to happen also, yet did not take the steps necessary to handle that volume.

Don't get me wrong, I am a hardcore FF fan, and this will not deter me. I plan on playing this game for a long time. I also have full faith in Yoshida, he has done an incredible job bringing this game back from the brink. Unfortunately, my faith in SE is not nearly as high, and the lack of response to this mini-crisis from the SE support staff has only lowered that faith even more.

Last I checked, over 16,500 users reported experiencing the '3102' lockout bug on the beta forums. And I'm pretty sure that is only a fraction, since many players do not use the forums at all. All those player's characters are in a sort of limbo, remaining on the servers, but unable to be accessed. Which is keeping those who did not get the error from logging on.

All in all, a very bad situation. Early access is scheduled to start in 3 days, and the official launch is set 3 days after that. So, SE has less than one week to get this all sorted out for a successful launch. My hopes and prayers are with them.

Story time! I went to an all-girls’ school. My friends and I had that special bond of closeness that apparently comes with synced-up periods and measuring the length of each other’s winter leg hair.
This, obviously, led to a brief era of trying to catch one of the others unawares with the most impressive, most unexpected spank possible. We’re talking sneaking up behind each other in the hallway and laying one down that made the earth shake. If I couldn’t read your palm from the imprint, you weren’t doing a good enough job.